WILLING HEARTS
For businessman and founder of Willing Hearts, Tony Tay, binding a community starts with a nourishing meal
Binding a community starts with a nourishing meal.
Just before Tony Tay’s mother passed away in 2003, she gave him her well- worn commercial kitchen and cooking utensils. “You never know when you will need them,” she told him. The assorted pots, pans and ladles were as familiar to Tony as were her special dishes – she used them countless times when cooking for family occasions and large gatherings. What am I going to do with all this? he thought.
Not long afterwards, while at his mother’s funeral, a nun attending the ceremony asked Tony for help with collecting bread from a bakery and delivering it to the church’s orphanage. He didn’t hesitate – here was a chance to give back for the charity shown to him over 55 years earlier.
Tony was only five when, in 1947, his mother was forced to place him in a Catholic children’s home for five years after his father abandoned the family. At the time, Singapore was struggling to recover from the Asia-Pacific War. With four children to feed, no education and jobs hard to find, his mother fought to make ends meet. With a low-paying job as a housekeeper with the British army, she had to work at several jobs to keep food on the table. In the children’s home, she knew, Tony wouldn’t go hungry.
By age ten, Tony often accompanied his mother as she walked from church to church, and temple to temple, kneeling and praying for food. Dinners comprised of whatever food there was – cauliflower stems, bacon offcuts, and whatever leftovers she could get from her employers. “We had the hardest life,” recalls Tony. As he got older, Tony found a job working for the then British-owned grocery store Cold Storage. “In those days, you either slogged or joined the gangsters.”
He eventually found success in the insurance and printing business, married and raised a family. He was looking forward to spending more
time with his family and grandchildren when he eventually retired.
“Distributing the bread reminded me of the times when I had to queue for food and nobody asked why,” he says. “The temple just gave the food to us.”
Soon after, another nun asked Tony to distribute unsold vegetables from a wholesaler to the poor. While distributing the vegetables with his wife, an elderly man in a rented government flat approached them and asked for food. He was living by himself and could not cook. The couple began making and delivering a homecooked meal to the man every day.
Over time, the number of meals Tony was cooking in his kitchen at home grew and two friends decided to pitch in and help. But as the number of meals grew, so did the rubbish and complaints from his neighbours. “A policeman, a Land Transport Agency officer, and the National Environment Agency were even called,” says his daughter Anne. “The house was filling up with volunteers to help cook, prepare and deliver the food. We were like strangers in our own home.”
Then one day, they ran out of rice needed to make the 1000 meals needed for the next day. “We’ll pray about it,” Tony remembers saying to his worried family. It worked – before day’s end, a rice merchant had given them an excess shipment he needed to off load. Soon after, the family’s entire house – the living room, kitchen and bedrooms – was filled with sacks of rice.
ACCORDING TO THE WORLD BANK,
Singapore is a high-income economy. But local economist Yeoh Lam Keong estimates that there are between 110,000–140,000 households living in
poverty. These include the working poor and the unemployed – people who face a daily challenge of buying food. Some estimates show Singapore has about 20 to 35 per cent of households living in relative poverty, unable to access basic daily needs.
Within two years the high number of meals Tony and his small team cooked each day forced them to move operations to a larger kitchen. Af ter brief ly occupying church premises and an industrial complex, the meal centre moved to a government-managed community hub in Eunos, east of Singapore. Willing Hearts, a non-profit organisation, was born. Today, Willing Hearts serves around 7000 meals a day, has ten full-time staff, and is dependent on donors and volunteers for rent, electricity, food and labour.
Every day Tony faces the challenge of getting enough volunteers to help with food preparation, cooking and delivering – often without knowing what ingredients will be donated for the meals. “We once had so much peanut butter that we did not know what to do,” he recalls. “I thought for a moment, then cooked the Malay dish of Mee Siam (thin rice noodles with gravy).”
Tony arrives at the Willing Hearts kitchen at 3am to cook and co-ordinate. About 200 volunteers gather round rectangle tables to cut, peel and wash vegetables and other ingredients, while another group of volunteers deliver the cooked lunches to 40 collection points, all within walking distance of beneficiaries. The day ends in the evening after collecting donated ingredients and vegetables for preparation the following day.
Like the elderly man who asked him for the first meal, Tony never asks why people are taking his food. “We do not judge,” he says.
At 71, Tony has no plans to stop. Instead, he intends to increase the number of meal deliveries to feed more people.
“More people are coming in asking for help, especially stroke patients and the disabled and we have to move forward,” he says. What keeps him going? “The smile on people’s faces when they see the food,” Tony says. “Food in the stomach is the most basic thing. I can’t take care of all their problems but at least when there is food in the stomach, thoughts of other things can change; it binds people and communities. In Singapore, we call it the kampong spirit (Malay-village community spirit).”
In 2013, Tony received the Singapore President’s Volunteerism & Philanthropy Award, and last year the Philippines' Ramon Magsaysay Award, which recognises transformative leadership in individuals in Asia. Willing Hearts is the only secular charity in Singapore to offer delivered meals to the poor, including halal food for Muslims.